Sep 8, 2014

I would love to be able to say that I finally know the specifications of the upcoming Maxwell-based NVIDIA graphics cards, which will be known as the GeForce GTX 900 series instead of 800.

Unfortunately, I can't say that, because NVIDIA still hasn't released the things, and the others who know them have been ordered to silence. Not that the clocks are final yet, but still. Fortunately, other information can be disseminated on the Maxwell-based video cards, such as the preliminary benchmark tests. The folks at VideoCardz have put together a benchmark chart of sorts. You can see it in the picture up on the right.

As we expected, two GeForce GTX 980 in SLI are the best in the list, right after the R9 295 X2 from AMD, which is actually a single card but has two GPUs instead of one. Keeping with the trend, GeForce GTX 980 is better than all other single video cards too. On that note, the GTX 980M SLI, the mobile GPU, rules its category as well (see the attached image below). It's not clear how these synthetic benchmarks will translate into real world performance, since every game runs differently depending on producer and API used (especially if they support Mantle, which provides great boosts for AMD graphics only), but at least we have something to go on now. Image gallery below, click for larger view.